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Review of Warriors and Expansion #1: Dragon Hordes
Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 30-45 minutes
Summary of the Components
Warriors comes with a deck of 110 cards and 5 dice. Dragon Hordes supplements that with 60 more cards.
Quality: The cards are medium weight and linen-textured. The dice are plastic with inked-in pips. 4 out of 5.
Beauty: The cards all feature attractive, high-quality fantasy artwork that reproduces well on the cards. It's by Prof Hubert. Beyond that the graphic design of the cards is good. 5 out of 5.
Usability: Unfortunately, the game falls apart a little bit on usability. Clear, easy-to-see icons represent the three sorts of units (infantry, cavalry, archers); while slightly muddier icons show each racial nation's enemies. So, that's the good bit.
Unfortunately, there's nothing to remind you of what the three sorts of units do and nothing to remind you of how the various races are ranked. Though players should quickly catch on to the unit powers, the racial ranking is a notable issue. Similarly, there's no indication of what the wizard and catapult cards do -- though again players will catch on to that relatively quickly. 3 out of 5.
Theming: The theming is pretty light: it's basically fantasy races placed on cards to represent fantasy armies. Still, they're well-chosen races that make for a fun fantasy-themed game. 3+ out of 5.
Overall, Warriors stands out based on the quality and beauty of its cards, and its components don't include any deal-breakers, so it earns a "4" out of "5" for Style.
Summary of the Gameplay
In Warriors, the object is to earn the most points by killing enemy units and by winning majority points at the end of the game by having the most living units of each fantasy race.
Setup: Each player is given a random assortment of cards. These cards show archer, cavalry, and infantry units of the various races: undead, dwarves, trolls, elves, goblins, and barbarians. There are also wizards and catapults. Each player reveals all of his cards and arranges each race of soldiers into a "nation". Wizards may be placed with any nations. Catapults are set to the side.
Rounds of Play: The game is now played over three rounds of play. On a round of play a player is dealt additional cards, which he keeps some of. These cards may depict additional army units or they may be "battle" cards.
Playing a Battle. The battle cards are all numbered, and are played in ascending order. When a player plays a normal battle card, he picks one of his racially-segregated nations and then chooses to attack a nation of another player; that nation must be of the same race or it can be the race's arch-enemy (e.g., goblins hate dwarves and vice-versa).
Alternatively, a player may play a "mercenary battle" card, which allows him to put together a mixed unit of 3 or 4 units to attack any one nation.
Fighting a Battle. To fight a battle, each player rolls dice equal to the number of their infantry -- but to a maximum of 3 for the attacker and 2 for the defender. If one of the players has more archers, he gets a +1 on his highest die. Now the players compare dice, highest to the highest and second highest to the second highest (presuming both players rolled two dice). If the attacker is higher, he eliminates a defending unit, else an attacking unit is destroyed.
If the defender is not entirely obliterated, the attack can choose to continue with a new set of die rolls.
Riding to a New Battle. If the attacker has at least one cavalry card in his attacking force he may choose to now attack a new (legal) nation. To do so he flips one of his attacking cards face-down, to mark that it's holding the terrain it just took.
Wizards & Catapults. A wizard keeps a nation from being attacked. A catapult can be expended to have a 3 in 6 chance of destroying any unit at any time. Wizards and catapults are discards at the end of each round, even if they weren't used.
Ending the Game. The game ends after three rounds. Now each defeated unit is word 2 points. In addition, the largest undead army earns 5 points, the largest dwarf army earns 6 points, etc.
The Dragon Hordes Expansion: The Dragons expansion introduces dragons. Each one is its own army who can attack anyone -- but only with a special "dragon battle" card. They're nasty guys, as they always roll two dice at +1 each. They can also have "flames" placed on them. Each flame can be expended if a dragon would otherwise die.
Catapults aren't as good at hitting dragons, requiring a 1 in 6 -- but they kill a dragon, going past any flames.
Relationships to Other Games
Warriors was originally designed as a card game variant of Risk. That origin is still visible in the idea of fighting armies and in the die rolling mechanic. One player noted, that there are no chokepoints, however, to the game's deficit. So, no holing up in fantasy Australia with the marsupial humanoids!
The Game Design
Warriors is a light game of battles. Even in its card form, it has the typical strengths and weaknesses of a game of warfare. On the one hand, you can have fun battling with a lot of free choice. On the other hand, players can team up and harshly smash the person currently winning. Warriors tries to offset that somewhat with its limitations of who a nation can attack (i.e., only the same or enemy nation), but there's still going to be teaming up and even kingmaking at the game progresses. One of the worst aspects of the game, for me, was that it seemed to encourage attacking the weakest opponents, since they had the least chance of hurting an attacker's your forces in return.
There's also a pretty huge amount of randomness in the game. Again, there's some attempt to offset that: each player only keeps some of the cards that he's dealt each turn. Nonetheless, the armies you get are somewhat outside of your control. You can even get really unlucky and get no battle cards over the course of a round. (This isn't as horrible as it sounds; though you don't get much choice in who you fight, you can still get points by killing your attacker's forces.) There's also a lot of variance in the results of the dice rolled.
On the whole, if you expect a light, random combat game, Warrior is OK. I've given it a "3" out of "5" for Substance.
Unfortunately, I think the Dragon Hordes supplement makes a somewhat mediocre game worse. Dragons become the most powerful battle force on the board, and due to an overabundance of dragon battle cards, they dominate the battle lines as well. The other armies become less important, and the minimal strategy of the game becomes entirely one-dimensional. With Dragon Hordes, Warriors only earns a "2" out of "5" for Substance … so I don't suggest getting it.
Conclusion
Warirors is a light and random game of cardplay and warfare. There's no depth here, and not a lot of strategy, but FRP players still might enjoy it as a light diversion before an RPG. However, I don't suggest picking up the Dragon Hordes supplement, which I think damages the game.
